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The Flask is back in Bend

Roots-punk institution plays New Year’s Eve at Volcanic

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Larry and His Flask -- from left, Andrew Carew, Jamin Marshall, Ian Cook and Jeshua Marshall (Kirk Skatvold not pictured) -- will play a short Pacific Northwest tour to close out 2017, including a New Year's Eve bash at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Sunday. (Submitted photo) - Bulletin

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Larry and His Flask -- from left, Andrew Carew, Jamin Marshall, Ian Cook and Jeshua Marshall (Kirk Skatvold not pictured) -- will play a short Pacific Northwest tour to close out 2017, including a New Year's Eve bash at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Sunday. (Submitted photo)7006110

Larry and His Flask hit the road in 2008 — and didn’t come home for nearly six years.

At the time, the Central Oregon punk band had lost its house, a victim of the recession. The band was also starting to develop the acoustic-based, high-energy roots/punk hybrid it would become nationally known for. The timing seemed fortuitous, at least careerwise.

“We lived in a van for a long time,” drummer and co-founder Jamin Marshall said recently while sitting with bassist, brother and co-founder, Jeshua Marshall and guitarist/vocalist Ian Cook in Cook’s home studio in Bend. The band was gearing up to play a short Pacific Northwest tour, including New Year’s Eve at Volcanic Theatre Pub. “… I really always had the mentality and viewed it as a car — our career. I don’t think I called it that back then or even thought about it like that, but I viewed it as a car that you’re just driving as fast as you can towards your goal, I guess. And at the time, our goal was just rock ’n’ roll.”

Between 2011 and 2014, the band was playing close to 200 shows a year; in 2011, it played Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas, Riot Fest in Chicago and spent most of the summer on the Vans Warped Tour, during which time the band’s RV broke down. The six band members spent the Warped Tour riding on friends’ buses separate from each other, with their gear on another truck (Cook recalled riding 16 hours in the back of a box truck during a heat wave in the Midwest).

At one stop, Jamin and mandolinist/trumpeter Kirk Skatvold fell asleep and wound up locked in the back lounge of a tour bus, with 10 minutes until they were supposed to be onstage. After waking up their tourmates in the bus bunks — and some scolding from the bus driver as everyone tried to get the door open — the two slipped out the window.

“It’s about, no joke, at least 11 or 12 feet (off the ground),” Jamin said. “We squeeze out of it, and I bailed face-first out of the window, hit the ground. And then I kind of held Kirk … and we were just like, which direction is the main stage? Somebody’s like, ‘Over there, freaks!’ And we just ran.”

The nonstop touring took its toll on the band. In summer 2014, the band’s van, trailer and gear were stolen in South Carolina. By the end of the year, the group went on hiatus; guitarist Dallin Bulkley moved to Kansas, while Jamin headed to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“It’s one of those things — it’s like, that’s life,” Jeshua said. “We did a lot, so there was a lot of crazy, bad stuff that happened, and a lot of really lucky, awesome things, too.”

The band played a handful of shows in 2015, including that year’s Crawfest and Bend Summer Festival. Meanwhile, the members of the band still based locally began branching out with other projects: Cook, Skatvold and banjoist Andrew Carew started classic rock group Woebegone with producer/drummer Dayne Wood, while Jeshua found new songwriting outlets in Guardian of the Underdog and Hot Club of Bend.

The last few years have seen the band slowly ramp up its touring schedule. It joined Flogging Molly’s Salty Dog Cruise in March 2016, and this year toured across the country. Next year promises to be even busier: The band returns to Punk Rock Bowling for the festival’s 20th anniversary in Las Vegas in May, and a European tour is in the works.

“It’s funny how everybody had their own outlets that they needed to pursue, and we could all do that and come back around to regroup and be even more unified than we left off,” Jamin said. “Ian — Woebegone’s kind of like his classic-y rock-y style outlet, and Jesse has his Gypsy and political stuff, and I swam in the ocean for a couple years. And we all feel better now.”

Jamin, who left the Virgin Islands with his girlfriend right before the hurricanes destroyed the house they were staying in, will soon relocate to Denver. “The distance before (between the Virgin Islands and Bend) was about 5,000 miles — I was actually closer to Africa than I was Bend, Oregon, at that point,” Jamin said. “So Denver, Bend, is no big deal.”

Bulkley, however, left the band in October after more than a decade with the group to focus on his new, Kansas-based band Carrie Nation and the Speakeasy. The guitarist started out as Larry’s No. 1 fan, joining the band on the road before he was an official member and pitching in gas money.

“We’ll always hold what he put into the band at a high regard, but it definitely came to a point where we just weren’t flowing in a working relationship with him,” Jeshua said. “I think that (is) a part of what’s brought us to some clarity to where we want to go now.”

In February, the group released a two-song single on Bandcamp. The now-five-piece is currently working on its first studio album since 2013’s “By the Lamplight,” at local studio The Firing Room with Wood producing. Tentatively titled “Remedy,” the album should be released sometime in the spring, and the band plans to launch a crowd-funding campaign through pledgemusic.com early next year.

“I want this to be something danceable — something just back to the core of the band — and have it be this fun, up-tempo thing,” Cook said. “Instead of where ‘By the Lamplight’ was half really dark and sad and slow, and there was only a handful of up-tempo songs that were fun. It didn’t really feel like us when we finally released it, and a lot of people said so too.”

Even with more touring and new music slated for next year, Larry and His Flask is taking things much slower than it did in the early 2010s. Sobriety, families and time have all helped to ground the band.

“I feel more energized and revitalized about Larry and His Flask than I have in a long time,” Jamin said. “… After we took the break, it was kind of topsy-turvy even then: When, how are we gonna make this work? And now, we’ve formulated a plan, and we know how we’re gonna make it work.”